'Jamie isn't one to linger on foreplay," says Tracey Cox as she watches some footage of a hunky builder trying, gamely, to service his girlfriend in a tangle of white sheets.
Cox says this crisply, as if her next utterance might be, "Jamie has chosen a rather unattractive turquoise for the kitchen walls," or "unfortunately, Jamie has no patience with the rhododendron."
The clinical tone is comforting, surely, for the casual viewer who stumbles on Sex Inspectors, blinks twice, and thinks: "Mother of God, are they actually doing it?" The answer is yes, they are, more than once and often badly.
Jamie and Charlotte are an improbably gorgeous couple who had an improbable amount of sex, four or five times a week, until Charlotte let slip that in all those trips to the carnival, she had never once seen the fireworks go off. So to speak.
Thus begins the first episode of Sex Inspectors, a much-discussed series on Britain's Channel 4 that doesn't so much push the boundaries of television as shove the boundaries to the ground and rip all their clothes off. The six couples who participated in the show allowed cameras into their bedrooms for a matter of weeks, and now will have their sexual dysfunctions laid bare for the country, and their parents, to witness.
Ostensibly, the point of the show is for the Sex Inspectors -- relationship pundit Tracey Cox and gay "agony uncle" Michael Alvear -- to offer the couples help in overcoming their sexual difficulties. In Charlotte's case, an inability to achieve orgasm is tied to intimacy anxieties, and she often hides her face from her partner (oddly, she seems not to care about the millions of people watching from outside her home). At one point, clearly worn down by the week's unfulfilling sexorama, Charlotte wails, "I can't even [bleeping]shag any more!"
Jamie has the aforementioned foreplay issues, and when the sultry, dark-haired Cox gives him creative counsel in the middle of what appears to be a Body Shop, he looks like he'd rather be eating bugs in the middle of the jungle: My mad girlfriend has signed me up for this reality show, get me out of here!
What kind of couple agrees to have the whole country witness their sexual shortcomings? According to Steph Harris, the series's editor, Jamie and Charlotte were approached in a shopping centre by one of the show's producers, and turned out to be perfect fodder. One other couple was also approached on the street, and the rest were found through advertisements.
"They're not exhibitionist couples," says Harris, "but they are very brave."
Sex Inspectors airs at 11 p.m., but even at that late hour the show has to abide by standards set by Ofcom, the government broadcast regulator. In other words, Harris says, no penetration shots, and particularly graphic acts are filmed using thermal imaging, which is bound to have viewers squinting at the squirming coloured blotches to figure out the action.
And viewers did watch: According to Channel 4, Sex Inspectors drew 1.9-million viewers, almost twice the number who normally tune in at that time. Harris says that there has already been interest from American broadcast outlets -- not the Janet Jackson-burned networks, but the more risk-taking cable channels.
Sex Inspectors is only the most recent and controversial program in the makeover empire of the British production house Talkback, which is also responsible for the reality hits How Clean Is Your House? and Property Ladder. "Television has become such a friend to people," says Harris. "People know that they can get take-away information and perhaps they don't have to go to a therapist or read a book."
Some therapists, naturally, take exception to this view, and to the idea of sexual dysfunction as a DIY project to be completed over a weekend. "What worries me is the anxiety this might create in viewers," says Paula Hall, a sex psychotherapist with the Relate agency in Warwickshire. "We all enjoy the garden- and home-makeover programs, but those aren't dynamic forces. If it doesn't work, you can dig it up or paint over it the next day. But what if people watch this and try it and it doesn't work? You're going to create even more anxiety."
Sex Inspectors is outré even in a country that often chucks discretion overboard in the name of reality TV, where millions of viewers sit rapt as wives are swapped or entire streets of fat folk attempt to go on collective diets.
In the race for viewers and water-cooler attention in England, good taste regularly gets trampled underfoot. Recently, celebrity reality show The Farm drew complaints when Rebecca Loos (David Beckham's alleged paramour) was required to manually stimulate a pig. And Channel 4 has a show in development that will follow, using time-lapse photography, the decomposition of a corpse. All it needs now is the corpse.
The days of Mary Whitehouse, who led a campaign against smut for more than three decades in England, are long gone. Sex toys are sold in Debenhams, the most staid department store in the land, and recently, Hustler opened its first British sex shop, in Birmingham.
"Things are changing enormously," says Hall, the sex therapist. "A few years ago, this would never have been allowed on telly, day or night." The only remaining taboo, she says, would be for Sex Inspectors to feature a gay couple.
But the most interesting thing about Sex Inspectors may be what it reveals about television, not sex; about us as viewers, not voyeurs. At one point, the viewer watches Cox and Alvear as they watch Charlotte and Jamie watching TV. Our randy couple has been told "no TV before sex" but they're rebelliously slumped in front of the box anyway. "British people watch an average of two hours of television a day," Cox tells us, the viewers. "You know how often we have sex? Forty minutes a week average. Naughty, naughty!"